InfoQ's New Redesign: Video Tour and Feedback

The above video provides a guided tour of the first major redesign of InfoQ since its inception. The intention of this redesign is to make it easier for users to find content they want, to simplify most pages to emphasize content instead of sidebars and metadata, and to make the site easier to read and more tablet/mobile friendly.

The new homepage offers both a graphical "grid" view as well as a text only list view (see top right corner); these homepages reflect that InfoQ has gone beyond the world of tech blogs and is now a high volume multi-media site offering an average of 20 news items, 20 conference presentation videos, 4 articles, 3 interviews, research questions and books every week. The new design makes it easier for users to find all of this content, and also scan in one view all new content published in the last few days on the homepage.

The new ‘popular widget’ ( top right) is a new feature requested by our users. Other changes based on user requests include index pages for each content type and numerous other enhancements on each page.

Next on our list of upgrades: moving from fixed-width to a responsive design that can scale up to larger widths and down to mobile devices. Later this year we plan to make it easy to subscribe to individual topics on the site, redo our personalization algorithm to allow you to make custom views of the topics you care about, and explore improving the accessibility of our videos: the #1 request we get is for offline capable video.

We’re excited to unveil the new design and we hope you like it, too! –If you have a moment, please answer our survey questions below so we can better gauge how you feel about this new look. Feel free to leave long form comments below or email us at feedback@infoq.com.

Let us know what you think on Twitter using #infoqreskin or on our Facebook page.

The whole page looks like one big busy wall of text now. At least in the old design the right sidebar had a different color to separate it from the main column. Also - can you cram anything else into the top nav area?

See, I liked infoq for it's content obviously but I also liked how infoq used to present in list view. List view provide easy way to have look on all new stuff in order and once I reached old news I stopped. With new look, I need to jump from one place to other in home page to know update of each category .. :(I request you to also support Old view [list view] with New UI changes.

The button for it along the grey nav bar at the top right - look for "New UI" Next to that are two buttons. The one on the far right is the list view.

The new list view is particularly cool because it shows everything as a single list - interviews, articles etc. In the old design the only way to get this was via RSS as far as I know. You can filter it to just news or whatever though if that is your preference.

It seems that the designers forgot that sacred rule of software development: Principle of least astonishment. Here is my list of issues.

1. For starters, how do you blockquote or add links? Do we use the same codes are before, or is it with straight html? Surely I can find out by trial and error, but almost as surely I didn't have to with the old design. Speaking of which, how do you preview (again without actually having to do it by trial and error.)

In essense, functions related to post creation/editing were self-evident in the old design.

2. The new design makes infoq look like one of those cheap scrapper site. True that my opinion might be subject to bias due to my navigational knowledge of the site, but still, I just don't see how to navigate to the content the way I used to. It's all a bunch of stuff splattered across a white background.

3. The best feature the old design had was the topic column on the right, from which one could select/navigate video interviews, presentations and articles INDEPENDENTLY of their topic. Now you have to know precisely what to search for in terms of media. You can only see either only articles or only interviews or only news. No way to quickly skimp through them all on the right-side column as before.

4. The most confusing part is that when you click on "All Topics" get you into a strange mind-map-like kind of graph of topics.

Really? Someone is having a lot of fun with Javascript/HTML5/whatever. Very dazzling, supposedly pretty, and, err, confusing. What's the function behind it? What do us visitors get out of it?

If you click on one topic node, it expands into sub-topics with all the others dissapearing. It is not self-evident that one must click on the infoq logo to go back to the previous hierarchical display. It gets worse when you click not on the topic but on the edge connecting it to the rest - it pops another tab/page with the topic (instead of opening the topic in-situ or letting the user right click on it, giving the option of opening the topic in-situ or on another tap (which is the standard navigational means for well-designed sites.)

It is even worse if your mouse in on top of the graph and you want to scroll down or up the page. Instead of getting the functionality ${DEITY:-FSM} intended on the scroll bar for web page navigation, all of the sudden you are zooming in or out, as if there were enough topics to warrant that.

A tree-like structure would have been better. Or any of the other existing navigational schemes known as web design best practices.

One more thing, I can switch to List view but every time I visit infoq.com I will first lend to home page then need to change to list view. In sort, two click.Do you have any direct link to start infoq in list viewORIs there any way I can choose in my prefrence to show always in list view.

1. Below the comment editor is a note that says "allowed HTML" and lists the allowable tags. AFAIK they are exactly the same as before.

The new design makes infoq look like one of those cheap scrapper site.

2. You may prefer the list view

The best feature the old design had was the topic column on the right, from which one could select/navigate video interviews, presentations and articles INDEPENDENTLY of their topic.

3. You can still do this via the listview.

The most confusing part is that when you click on "All Topics" get you into a strange mind-map-like kind of graph of topics.

This was also there in the old design.

Seriously, no preview before posting?

Agreed. A preview would be good. You can edit a comment briefly after posting it though.

Mostly I think the new site is a big improvement on the old one. We do seem to have lost the ability to filter out topics though which I used a bit to get rid of things like Ruby posts which I'm just not interested in. Be good to get that back at some point. Because my existing filters still work I'm not too concerned but that level of personalisation was a nice feature of the old design.

I gave it a week to see if it "grows" on me. My conclusion is no, it doesn't grow on me. I've ended up not reading InfoQ most days and find the new layout rather irritatting. Bottom line, my bias opinion is the new layout is a huge step backwards. The new list view sucks and harder to read.

Did you try using Personas in terms of the new UI development? From watching the video I just realised there's a total disconnect between the way I've been using the site and how the owners perceive their site. For example, there's a big emphasis on being multimedia-friendly in the video. However, that's one of the features I rarely use. I've been pretty content with slides and transcripts to filter out if something is really worth watching - as it takes a lot less time, and I don't have much opportunity to linger about and enjoy 45 minute videos.

When I came back frequently I didn't perceive the problem of any content dropping out of the top 8, as mentioned in the video. Maybe it's been one of the factors that brought me back every few days.

Nowadays, I've been coming back at least as often, but it's been a long time since I read any articles, or looked at any presentations. I'm just stopping by to see if I like it any better, but I still don't get that feeling. I'm afraid I'll soon be drifting away.

My 2 cents: make news and presentations visible without scrolling, please. forget about sorting stuff by content type (just add a small icon or similar if other people need it) - the #1 thing is The content, not whether it's a video, article, presentation, news or otherwise. If it's worth checking out, I'll check it out, regardless how of it's wrapped up. I'm sure other people feel the same.